What LaLanne’s life says about yoga in the West. If anything.

He found, early, sure steps to a better life and he took those steps every morning, whether he felt like it or not.

His steady practice made him impressive. At 45, he did 1,000 jumping jacks and 1,000 pull ups in an hour and twenty-two minutes. At 70, he, cuffed and shackled, swam one and a half miles—all while pulling 70 boats and 70 people .

When I opened my first official health club in 1936, I’d go to Oakland High School at noontime. I’d pick out the fattest and the skinniest kids I could find, and I’d get their phone numbers and addresses and names. I’d go to fifty kids’ homes, and I’d sign up fifty out of fifty—I never missed. I’d tell their parents, “I’m going to save this kid’s life; he’s going to have the greatest life anybody can have, and if he doesn’t sign up, he’s going to miss out on it.” Then I’d tell those kids, “If you wear clean clothes, you’re not going to be a follower, you’re going to be a leader. I want you to cut your hair, I want those clothes to be neat and clean, and if you get lower than a C grade in school, you’re OUT.” Come to think of it, I was their guru—I was their mother, their father, their best friend, their everything. I knew about their sex lives, about how much money they spent, their aches and pains and all their problems. They came to me, I was their consultant, and we were family. And I worked those kids, I’ll tell you—you wouldn’t believe it. It’s a wonder some of them didn’t die!

I found the interview after I had already made the comparison myself.

As soon as I saw Mr. LaLanne’s death top Google News, I wondered how I might give the story an elephant-appropriate angle. Two minutes in and I hastily—and pragmatically—concluded Jack LaLanne was one of the closest things to an asana-less yogi America has ever had. Four minutes in and I was wondering if Mr. LaLanne’s lack of asana precluded his being a yogi at all. Ten minutes in, after reading a few obituaries mention Mr. LaLanne’s role in creating the modern fitness industry (he invented some of the first pulley machines and he pitched supplements and juicers), I was wondering if Mr. LaLanne wasn’t—innocently enough—instrumental in making Western yoga a spiritless shadow of what we’re all told it should be (and, in the East, supposedly still is).

The wondering went something like:

(1) Western yoga is often disparagingly distinguished from its Eastern incarnation by being

(2) (a) and (b) are especially Western vices because of the close association between America and the modern fitness industry.

(3) Wait, didn’t Jack LaLanne father the modern fitness industry?

So there I was, wondering what blog post angle to take on the death of Jack LaLanne. (It’s a rich life I live.) Was he a Western yogi? Or did he father the culture that threatens yoga’s pure passage through the States?

The two are, of course, compatible. But there was nonetheless a tension, somewhere, behind my wondering.

I decided the tightness had something to do with my inability to precisely say what is and is not yoga, an inability that grows all the greater (weaker?) in proportion to my desire to precisely say what is and is not yoga.

I used to think diet and exercise were the surest steps to living a good life. I ran every morning, lifted every afternoon, and generally sat at the feet of the modern fitness industry. (I once belonged to two gyms because my favorite gym had spotty hours on the weekends. My less favorite of the two, by the way, was Bally’s Fitness, which, incidentally, was what became of the gyms Mr. LaLanne used to own.) Then I came to think reading and writing were surer steps still and that athletics were valuable only insofar as they helped me think more clearly. At some point I started sitting and came to think both athletics and academia were only handmaids to meditation. They cultivated some of the same virtues necessary for sitting (repetition, discipline, attention) and derived their essential worth only insofar as they simulated those practices necessary for enlightenment.

This attitude—that Jack LaLanne was merely onto something good, something that the likes of Shunryu Suzuki and Pattabhi Jois had come to fully possess and share in all its purity—is one I have today. I think my pursuits form some progression whose perfection will be the perfection of my meditation practice, not the perfection of my mile or one-rep max and not the perfection of my intellectual pursuits. (And that’s not just because my mile, one-rep max, and intellectual pursuits are all pretty unimpressive stuff: because my sitting practice isn’t all that great either.)

Sometimes I think this.

Other times I think yoga just is the eternally vain pursuit of perfection, a pursuit that, like holding tightly to a stick till your knuckles whiten, pays off only when you let go and the blood flows all the better. Yoga is just becoming “yoked” to an arbitrary pursuit or activity and isn’t attached to any particular set of practices or postures. Yoga just is the joyful, therapeutic art of catch and release and my desire to find some single practice that most fully incarnates yoga is, well, only the catch (22?) of yoga.

Most of the time I think I have absolutely no idea what yoga is and, accordingly, no idea whether Jack LaLanne was a yogi and no idea whether Western yoga by and large misses the (small? large?) boat to nirvana.

So I’ll end by simply deferring my doubt to someone whose life as a yogi isn’t in question:

1212498 Responseshttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.elephantjournal.com%2F2011%2F01%2Fwas-jack-lalanne-the-death-of-yoga-dan-slanger%2FOn+the+Life+of+Jack+LaLanne+%26+the+Death+of+Yoga.+%7E+Dan+Slanger2011-01-28+21%3A54%3A22elephant+journalhttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.elephantjournal.com%2F%3Fp%3D121249 to “On the Life of Jack LaLanne & the Death of Yoga. ~ Dan Slanger”

Daniel,
I need the REALLY Like button for this. As always you have a most innocent way of musing that comes round to reveal something that feels like the truth without preaching. I just love that. I'd vote Jack LaLanne as a yogi for sure. Great post.

I think the truth here is it's tough to say what all yoga is for someone—like myself—who's new enough to practice to see only misalignment in the mirror yet old enough to practitioners—like yourself—to see in them kind, sane souls (who can also swap their left and right with uncommon nobility and grace).

And LaLanne was someone who knew something good and devoted his life putting that knowledge into practice and sharing that practice with as many people as possible. So he was a yogi if anyone who knows no Sanskrit can be a yogi.

[…] across Tokyo harbour pulling an armada of boats with his teeth. Oops. That’s me remembering Jack LaLanne from an infomercial. But I do kind of expect Chinmoy to start selling a juicer or a tofu press. I […]

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